New York State Social Studies Review and Development Committee Report, June 1991 (Picture/Donald Earl Collins). One of several reports produced for the New York State Education Department and Commissioner, as part of the Commissioner's Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence

Twenty years ago this week, I began writing an academic piece that would lead to my dissertation topic, doctorate and first book Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It was a topic that I’d fall in and then out of love with. Ironically, I pursued this topic because of my academic experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. The topic was multiculturalism, and more specifically, multicultural education, and how to achieve this kind of curriculum reform in K-12 education. Just writing these words makes me feel both young and naive at the same time.

This whole quest started with a girl. Actually, with the young woman “Another E” (see “The Power of Another E” from April ’09 and “Beyond the Asexual Me” from last month”). She wanted to put an article together for publication, in response to what was then a major controversy involving research into the revision of New York State’s social studies and other curricula. The New York State Department of Education had given a committee the task of figuring out how to make the state’s K-12 curriculum more inclusive and representative of the state’s tremendous racial, ethnic and other forms of diversity.

By the end of September ’91, it would produce A Curriculum of Inclusion: Report of the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence. But that deliverable was far from my mind when, tired from my weeks of near starvation post-graduation that April (see “Sometimes Starvation” from May ’11), I reluctantly said okay to working on this article.

Now here I was, minus the young woman in whom I no longer had an interest, now working on a piece that had become more academic than either of us had originally intended. By the time I’d written my first words on multiculturalism, I’d already learned the names Leonard Jeffries, Asa Hilliard III and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I’d read articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about Jeffries’ name-calling, Schlesinger’s incredulousness about calling slaves “enslaved persons,” and about the committee in general getting along like hyenas tearing at a dead wildebeest.

If I’d been just a tad bit smarter, I would’ve done an investigative piece and called and emailed the people on this task force. I would’ve asked them to divulge to me what they would eventually tell the world about their dislike of each other and of anything “multicultural,” which was in quotes for them. For Schlesinger, multicultural was the equivalent of bad ethnic studies or a kind of Afrocentrism that blamed Whites for all that has ailed America and the world for the past 500 years. For Jeffries, it was a racist attempt at appeasing Blacks and other groups of color while maintaining the main theme of Whites on top.

Although this is an oversimplification, it’s not by much. There really wasn’t anyone from the task force, the

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., CUNY, circa 2006, months before his death on February 28, 2007. (http://www.nytimes.com)

NYS Department of Education, or anyone who spoke on the Himalayas-out-of-a-termite-mound controversy over a more inclusive K-12 curriculum without taking one of those two views. That’s what interested me the most. Schlesinger, and eventually, folks like Diane Ravitch, Mario Cuomo and others completely against revision that even approached cultural pluralism, versus Jeffries, Hilliard and others arguing beyond what they called a White multiculturalism.

I didn’t have the capacity at that stage of my life to see myself as a writer or a journalist in any way. Just two years removed from the end of my mother’s marriage to my now idiot ex-stepfather, I only saw the piece that I’d turn into a Master’s research paper, doctoral thesis and first book as an academic exercise, one where I found the philosophical middle. I hadn’t a clue as to how to make myself part of the Ground Zero issue of the first seven years of the ’90s, the Culture Wars.

But I did have one experience that provided unique insight into multiculturalism and the arguments made by scholars and pols on all sides. Six years in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools. A place where cultural diversity and how to deal with it within the curriculum was the elephant in the classroom. Some teachers and classes addressed it, and many didn’t, to the detriment of what was a solid program, not to mention me and the others who were my classmates.

Either way, I saw more issues of diversity crop up where a multiculturalist approach would’ve been helpful all during my time in Humanities, including with my kufi and my Hebrew-Israelite years. It was a missed opportunity, one that I unconsciously wanted to address with my research of and writing on multiculturalism.

A Brain Floating in the Heavy Cream of Obsession with Academic Excellence, December 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A quarter-century ago, education scholar and Ford Foundation education program director Jeanne Oakes published Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes’ groundbreaking, definitive work on the educational inequalities created or reinforced by ability grouping has led a whole generation of scholars to examine the viability of tracking in K-12 education. In a 2005 edition of her book, Oakes wrote that “through tracking, schools continue to replicate existing inequality along lines of race and social class and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and economic inequality.”

I picked up Oakes’ Keeping Track for the first time in ’90. By then, I already knew from experience how true her words and research were. Six years in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools via the Humanities Program had taught me all I’d need to know about the tensions between creating a class of students whose level of academic performance was par excellence while simultaneously addressing segregation and diversity in the school district. The magnet program and the district failed at one and succeeded at the other, which in turn reinforced its failure.

I worked on a paper some twenty years ago for the late Barbara Sizemore, my professor at the University of Pittsburgh my senior year (and a former superintendent of DC Public Schools) looking at how magnet school programs actually created resegregation in individual schools and Pittsburgh Public Schools because of the exclusivity that comes with tracking or ability grouping. It was an easy paper for me to do, guided in no small part by my experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. Easy, but not easy to get a handle on beyond the obvious demographics of race, class and test scores.

I managed to wiggle myself into the culture wars of the early ’90s and the debate around multiculturalism and K-12 education soon after that paper. It seems obvious now that the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities was what enabled me to take sides in favor of multiculturalism. That led to my dissertation looking at the historical development of multiculturalism among Blacks in Washington, DC (“A Substance of Things Hoped For,” Carnegie Mellon University, 1997 for those who want more information), and eventually, my first book, Fear of a “Black” America from six years ago.

But it took my memoir Boy @ The Window to bring me back to square one. I realized about a year ago that I’d done nearly thirty interviews of former classmates, teachers and administrators for the manuscript. There was much more material to mine beyond their impressions of me and how to shape their descriptions of themselves — and my memories of them — into characters for Boy @ The Window. I decided to work on an academic piece that looked at the benefits and pitfalls of high-stakes schooling — not just testing — in the form of a history lesson via magnet schools, specifically my Humanities experience.

After a quick rejection, I redoubled my efforts a few months ago. I decided to look at the education psychology and sociology literature, as well as Oakes again, to see how these interviews and my experiences could be useful in our testing-obsessed times. I finally realized what had troubled me about Humanities for the past three decades. It was the reality that all involved with Humanities had taken on the e pluribus unum identity of an academic superstar (much more than just a nerd, by the way). Beyond Black or White, and ignoring the realities of poverty in our district and (at least for me) in our program, Humanities was all about sharpening our academic personas above all else.

This fueled the major success of Humanities during its existence between ’76 and ’93, which in turn would define its failures. In successfully nurturing the idea of academic excellence as identity, as evidenced by so many of us attending and graduating from college, this magnet program failed in its other major educational functions. It failed to embrace diversity, to help its students understand the diversity that was Humanities, to nurture creativity and imagination beyond A’s and college acceptances. It failed to develop the whole student, which aside from its charge to help desegregate Mount Vernon public schools, was its original mission.

Humanities failed because its teachers, administrators (including the former superintendent of schools) and many of the most vocal parents (mostly affluent and White) refused to deal with diversity seriously. Academic excellence without significant parental engagement or the humility necessary to discuss issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation led to a severe overemphasis on calling us the “creme de la creme.” All of this would have a negative impact on our development as students, and as emerging adults.

I don’t think that it’s asking too much of parents, administrators and teachers to work together in both striving for academic excellence while building programs that embrace difference and nurture creativity and imagination, and not just an addiction to A’s. Or is it?

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: